As an earth scientist, I am increasingly concerned about Trump and his cabinet people. As a business CEO himself, Trump has filled his cabinet with CEOs of major corporations. The job of CEOs of major corporations is to evaluate risks, examine models, make decisions, and deal with their consequences, all to the benefit of their stockholders. But now their “stockholders” are all of the citizens of the United States, indeed the world, not just their companies or their minority base. As a business CEO, Pruitt, now head of the EPA, should be skilled at looking at consequences of decisions that are predicted by models based on real data. Yet he diminishes the role of Carbon Dioxide in climate damage. Climate science predicts specific recognizable consequences of climate damage based on peer reviewed models. These consequences can already be seen. Does Pruitt see them or not? How about Trump’s other CEOs?

Citizen’s Climate Lobby and other science-based messengers continue to emphasize this message. Pruitt (and his boss Trump) must either kill the messenger, ignore the message in the face of the evidence, or come to recognize the obvious. The consequences won’t go away because Trump and his cabinet ignore them or deny them! We citizens hope Trump and his associates won’t ignore these consequences until we have crossed some irreversible threshold. Things like permafrost melting and other positive feedback mechanisms are not in the public view but are potentially devastating as we and the climate progress toward as yet poorly understood thresholds beyond which we have lost control! Science is working to understand such thresholds. This research must be funded! We must demand that the administration pay attention to all citizens, not just their base!

To ignore or deny climate change and its consequences is pandering to Trump’s beloved “uneducated” base. To all the rest of us, I address this appeal!